Spearhead: A Story of an American Tank Gunner, His Enemy, and the Collision of Lives During World War II

Jim Webber: Very well written and gripping story. Explores the true experiences of war in armoured vehicles while avoiding the age old national bias of other contemporary books.

Canada on Sep 24, 2023

Lobo73: Enjoyed very much

United States on Sep 22, 2023

P D LANGHAM: Loved this book, action, factual, photos, maps, all sides have input and an ending that inspires how true warriors respect one another and how PTSD can mess with any age group…..

United Kingdom on Jul 25, 2023

Warbird: Liked everything about this book. The documentation, the facts, the pure history, the photos and the flow of the entire document.
Very well done and I would recommend.

United States on Jul 17, 2023

Pigeon: This book started slowly, but the 2nd half… wow. I think it takes a while to get a good grip on who’s who. But once I got to know the characters I became immersed in their experience, and the impact that their experience had upon their lives after the war.

Australia on Jul 10, 2023

Justus: Touching, all these personal tragedies and moments of courage and also prudence. A bit too focused on the cologne tank duel.

Germany on Apr 19, 2023

Chris Grosso: This is the third Adam Makos book that I’ve read (a higher call and devotion being the first two). And as with the first two books that I just mentioned, Makos delivers the goods. And by that I simply mean that, once again, he finds the humanity and tells the personal aspects of the story equally as well as he recounts the military aspects. I came away having such a greater understanding of what it was like to be a part of a tank division but also came away having been deeply touched by understanding some of the personal journeys taken by some of these men.

United States on Apr 16, 2023

Cliente Amazon: This book was just a great read. From page 1 it grips you hard and gets you to come back to read at every opportunity you have. Makos’s style of paralleling the two stories of the main character is unaltered and it feels like reading “A Higher Call”. The end of the book leaves you wanting for more. Interesting pictures are present in the book. This book is a just an awesome read!

If you are looking for a detailed chronostory of the 3rd armored division actions in WW2, you may be disappointed as this book is a first-gand (real) tale of two fighters and their tanks. It makes you feel like you were having a dinner with them and listening to their stories. Not a chronostory of events.

Italy on Feb 21, 2022

Retired Prof: Subtitled An American Tank Gunner, His Enemy, and a Collision of Lives in World War II, this is the true story of one tank gunner (Clarence Smoyer), his crew mates, and their fellow tankers in the 3rd (“Spearhead”) Armored Division from September 2, 1944 to their last major battle on April 1, 1945. Along the way there is a major street battle in Cologne, the most dramatic (in several ways I won’t reveal here) fight, but not as climactic as the final battle at Paderborn in Germany, a Wehrmacht tank training center.

This is Adam Makos’ third book, all on the U.S. Military. He knows how to capture in print the vivid experiences about which he writes, including pee-in-your pants battles as well as bored-out-of-your skull idle times. Being a tanker meant being dirty, sweaty, grimy, and smelly, confined in what could well be your steel coffin, particularly as American Sherman tanks (later infrequently replaced by the more powerful Pershing) were outgunned by German Panthers, their major rivals in the battles described in the book. Tankers did not often die from bullets. More commonly, death came from being torn apart or burned alive from an enemy shell that pierced the...

United States on Jul 18, 2019

Marigold: I probably have 800 books on WW2 in my Kindle and on my bookshelf.
My father was in that war as were almost all of his friends and the fathers of my friends.
For a long time after the war, no one really mentioned the war or spoke of it except in reference to time: "That was before the war." "That happened after the war." Our parents and grandparents simply wanted to put it behind them.
Over the past few decades, these men (and women) have been coming out of the shadows and putting forth memoirs, biographies, journals and diaries and sharing them with us.
I have read dozens...hundreds....of them over the last 15 years.
Although I have also read and loved Makos' other books, it is this one that puts it, frankly, at the top of my list of the Best of the Best of all my WW2 books....and I have read some great ones.
It landed in my Kindle on the day it was released and I consumed it within a day or so. I then turned around and re-read it just so I could glean what I might have missed in my first reading.
All of those young men's lives and stories were brought to life by Makos so that I felt a personal connection to each one.
I will say that my two favorites were...

United States on Mar 06, 2019